


Connectivity Issues

by maniacalmole



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, M/M, not-quite-a-human-au, oh wow that's it it's just those two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-08-19 09:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20207653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maniacalmole/pseuds/maniacalmole
Summary: One minute and twenty-three seconds before the whole mess began, Aziraphale received a message."Heaven and Earth are currently experiencing connectivity issues.Miracles may be temporarily unable to function.We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this matter."Aziraphale instantly got a headache.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This fic, and my others, stick more closely to characterization from the book and from the fandom since 2015-ish. However I did love the TV series as well! If you've only seen the show, you might notice some things that are different, but nothing too major I don't think!  
Except Gabriel. I did not know Gabriel was going to be...like that. But I heard there was going to be an annoying boss character in the TV series and I couldn't help myself.
> 
> This fic is being translated into Russian by bestbest (thank you!!)! Check it out here: https://ficbook.net/readfic/8653150

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley receive some rather alarming messages.

One minute and twenty-three seconds before the whole mess began, Aziraphale received a message.

It was a fax, because Heaven was still a bit behind the times. Aziraphale had to remove multiple newspapers and solidified layers of dust off the fax machine to get to it. The message looked distorted. The bottom third of the letters were missing, the way a computer would sometimes only load part of the screen before freezing up. Aziraphale crouched and adjusted his glasses and frowned at it.

It said,

_Heaven and Earth are currently experiencing connectivity issues._

_ Miracles may be temporarily unable to function._

_ We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this matter._

_ Ok_

Aziraphale realized that the ‘Ok’ was inside of a little box, as though it were a button that he were meant to push. He jabbed it with his finger, even though it was _not_ ‘ok’, in fact it was a rather alarming thing to receive without any notice and without any clue as to what it meant, but he had a bad feeling about it, and he would have much preferred to get rid of the message by passive aggressively pressing a red ‘x’ in the corner, but no such option had been given.

The message burst into blue flames and burnt itself away.

One minute and twenty-three seconds after he had first heard the fax machine go off, the connectivity issues truly began.

Aziraphale instantly got a headache.

Crowley didn’t get his headache until about a half hour later, but it was there when he woke up. The phone had been ringing on and off, and his brain finally conceded defeat to his ears. He rolled out of bed and slouched over to the phone*, which stopped ringing at the exact moment he reached it.

*He had one in his bedroom, of course. It was chic. And also a very nice means of being lazy.

“Frmp,” Crowley grumbled, not awake enough yet to be bothered that it wasn’t a real curse word. He had gotten rid of his answering machine after the, well, the _incident_, even though Adam seemed to have set that right, too—just in case—and he hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. He let his hand fall back to his side and walked towards the kitchen to get himself something to drink.

As he shuffled across the main room of his flat, his glasses slid slowly down his nose. He frowned. That didn’t usually happen. He pushed them back up and raised his head to get them to stay.

That was when he noticed his television screen.

_Press play to start message_

Crowley grumbled something about how _it’s not a computer_ and _that’s not how it works_ and stalked over to the screen, scratched his chin, then poked the triangular ‘play’ button.*

*_Making me touch my screen really is evil_, thought Crowley, who was going to be really proud of the evil ingenuity of the future when touchscreens became the norm and visible smudgy fingerprints were absolutely everywhere.

The message played. Crowley listened. He gaped. He felt himself grow cold. His glasses slid down his nose again.

The phone rang again, and this time, he ran to answer it.

Aziraphale’s headache had grown worse by the time Crowley finally arrived. He almost wished the demon would just go home again, but he didn’t think sending off his one ally on Earth would be the wisest action during this time of crisis. _Was_ he his only ally on Earth? There were hardly ever any other angels on the planet these days. Even if there were, with these ‘connectivity issues’, he wouldn’t be able to contact them. Not that he thought that would do much good, anyway—the angels might know more about the issue, since pretty much everyone in Heaven tended to be better informed than he was about Upstairs’s doings, but other angels always took an irritatingly cavalier perspective towards things about which Aziraphale felt rather differently. ‘It’s only a decade, Aziraphale. Won’t be long.’ _What if it_ was _going to last for a full decade? _‘It’s only a broken arm, you have a whole other one!’ _Was he going to have to go to the hospital if he went around doing something like breaking an arm? _And other angels didn’t understand. It _hurt_. No, Aziraphale supposed he’d rather have Crowley around after all. At least he could empathize _properly_.

Plus, he had already tried everything, and he’d run out of new ideas. Crowley was always frustratingly good at coming up with new ideas.

“I’ve already tried everything, and I’ve run out of new ideas,” Aziraphale said as Crowley entered the shop, the bell pinging. “I was hoping you could—”

Crowley silenced him with a wave of his hand. He was using his other one to hold his glasses against his face, brow creased. Crowley stopped for a minute, visibly fuming, then said, “Coffee.”

“What?”

“Coffee first, talk later,” said Crowley, who knew very well how very evil this phrase was, but was using it anyway, not because he was trying to be demonic, but because his head was throbbing and the thought of thinking was—well, not good. “Apparently,” he said through gritted teeth, “I’ve become addicted. I suppose that is the sort of thing that would show up now.”

“It’s not a caffeine headache.”

“What?”

“I’ve tried,” Aziraphale said worriedly. “I’ve already had three cups. It hasn’t gone away.”

“Oh.” Crowley squinted. He raised a finger. He shook it. “Ah,” he said. “Right. Dehydration. That’s what it is. A dehydration headache.”

“You mean we have to drink _water?_” Aziraphale exclaimed.

“If the coffee made it worse,” Crowley said, “then you’re dehydrated. S’pose I am, too.”

“Yes, well, that will come of sleeping for sixteen hours straight,” Aziraphale said, in a tone that would have betrayed his headache had he not already mentioned it.

Crowley glared at him. His glasses had slid down his nose again, so the angel could see it.

“What took you so long, anyway?” Aziraphale said as he led the two of them towards the kitchenette in the back. “I must have called over an hour ago.”

“Bentley’s nmrkng,” Crowley mumbled.

Aziraphale turned to face him and raised an eyebrow. “What, dear boy?”

“I said the Bentley’s not working,” Crowley snapped. Then he sagged, and for once that morning, Aziraphale felt sorry for someone other than himself. He handed Crowley a glass of water and guided the two of them into the back room. “She’s all out of petrol,” Crowley was saying. “_Petrol_. Can you believe it? As though she should need such a thing.”

“I do believe all vehicles—” Aziraphale began, and then stopped when he saw Crowley’s face.

“How’m I supposed to get petrol without a car to get me to the petrol station in the first place?” he was complaining. He slumped down onto the sofa. The water sloshed dangerously in his glass, and Aziraphale had to bite his tongue to keep from saying anything about the fact that they couldn’t miracle the cushions dry if it spilled. “I had to walk here.”

“Why didn’t you just take a taxicab, dear boy?”

“On _these_ roads?” Crowley said, aghast. He gave a sharp laugh. “You think I’d trust my life with a human driver on _these_ roads? I was worried I’d get discorporated just _walking near_ them. I’ve _been_ on these roads, angel.”

_Part of the reason they’re so dangerous,_ Aziraphale thought, and he couldn’t keep from saying, “Well, it might teach you to drive a bit more carefully if you did.”

Crowley gave Aziraphale an odd look. “What exactly did Up There tell you about this whole thing, Aziraphale?”

“Not much,” he huffed. “Just ‘Heaven is experiencing connectivity issues, miracles are ‘off-line’, be back in a jiffy,’ that sort of hogwash.”

“Hmm. They called it ‘connectivity issues’? Downstairs said their connection with Earth was ‘going down for maintenance’.”

“Maybe they only said that because they were too embarrassed to admit to an accident.”

“Or maybe,” Crowley said, sneering at him, “it was the truth, and when Hell’s systems went down for maintenance, they somehow took all of Heaven’s with them.”

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. The thought of Heaven’s ‘systems’ being so tied up with Hell’s gave him a strange feeling.

Crowley’s sneer dropped. “Anyway,” he said, in a careful tone, “they didn’t tell you anything about, er, anything, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, have you thought about what might happen if we did get discorporated?”

Aziraphale felt a chill go down his spine, and settle somewhere in the pit of his stomach. Normally, you’d just end up back in Heaven, waiting on a new corporation—which could take quite a number of years. But with their connection severed, for whatever reason—

“Downstairs said only a little.”

“I suppose we could just sort of, float around on Earth for a while,” Aziraphale said, his voice betraying his concern. “Or perhaps not. I’ve only ever done that after being sent to Heaven first. I had a chance to—reconfigure myself then. I’m not really sure where we go when we first get—erm—killed, or die. Er. That is. I’m sure we’d be all right. Er, wouldn’t we?”

Crowley was giving him a look that was a little too sympathetic, considering that they weren’t on the verge of a terrible crisis that was forcing both of them to be a little more honest with each other. _Or were they?_

“What did—Down There tell you?” Aziraphale asked in a small voice.

Crowley sighed, setting his drained glass on the table. “’Hell has been scheduled for maintenance for an unknown duration. All preparations for corporation management will need to be completed before then. Corporation repair and maintenance WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE during the scheduled maintenance period.’ That part was in all-caps.”

“I could hear that,” Aziraphale said grimly. “Hold on. Did they send you this _warning_ in advance?”

“_Two hours_ in advance,” Crowley grumbled. “Which would hardly have been enough time to do anything in way of ‘corporation preparation’ other than—than going Downstairs and staying there, just so you can’t get killed up here.”

“And—and you didn’t do that?” Aziraphale asked, his voice even smaller.

Crowley’s face darkened with embarrassment. “I was asleep.”

Aziraphale felt his sentiments of mutual sympathy for the demon evaporating.

“Anyway,” Crowley snapped, “what kind of warning is that? An ‘unknown length of time.’ That could be _days_.”

“Or it could be years,” Aziraphale said.

They met each other’s eye.

“What kind of things have you been trying?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale told him all about his attempts to get in contact with Heaven. He’d tried praying. He’d tried the fax machine. He tried the special number Gabriel had given him the last time he’d complained about being put on hold for hours and days whenever he tried to contact Heaven, which was not very often, but he had always suspected that Gabriel had made up that number, anyway. He had even tried summoning Raphael himself, but the circle on the ground had stayed pure chalk and dust. Then he had gotten really desperate.

“And the Department Against Vain Summons didn’t even respond?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Watch this,” he said. He cleared his throat and raised his eyes generically Upwards. “Oh my _God_. God _dammit_. Jesus _Christ_.”

Crowley stared at him with his mouth hanging open as though he had just seen him transform magically into a cockatoo.

“Usually they swoop down on me if I try so much as a ‘Gosh darnit’,” Aziraphale said, rubbing his hands in despair.

“So they really aren’t listening to us,” Crowley said.

“They really aren’t.”

The two of them stared at each other in this startling silence, and for a moment, each of them imagined they could almost see their own thoughts reflected in the other’s eyes, thoughts full of wonderings about what could possibly be said during this newfound and rare opportunity of privacy.

Then Crowley’s glasses slid down his nose again, and he cursed.

“Why does that keep happening?” he complained as Aziraphale tutted, even though there was no one there to tut on behalf of, since apparently no one was listening. “Is this because of the no-miracles thing? Is this a common problem? They’re glasses! They’re supposed to cover people’s eyes!”

“They’ve worked for you normally, haven’t they?”

“Because I assumed they would,” Crowley said. “Just like I assumed the Bentley would run without petrol, and I assumed I wouldn’t need to drink five gallons of water or whatever it is we’re supposed to drink a day. But humans deal with so much _crap_. Why not _glasses falling down?_” He remembered seeing a certain common gesture in a certain type of animated television program that he had skimmed past several times throughout his past, and he resigned himself to the fact that this must be a common problem, although it had always looked rather cooler when they had slid _their_ glasses back up their noses and they went all shiny than when he did it.

“Well, you can’t let your glasses fall down, or else your eyes will show,” Aziraphale said.

“Oh, _really?_” Crowley seethed. “I thought it was because it was a little too _sunny_ here in _London_.”

They stared at each other in silence for the third time that day. Crowley’s face twitched. Aziraphale huffed.

“Well,” he said, “do be careful not to let anyone see your eyes on your way home.”

Crowley opened his mouth. Then he sighed irritably and walked towards the door. “Yeah. I might as well head out. Since obviously you haven’t thought of anything.”

“Yet,” Aziraphale corrected him. “And do let me know if you come up with anything better. Unless you’re planning on sleeping this thing out. Although I don’t think humans can normally sleep for a whole year straight, can they?”

Crowley grumbled nothing in particular as he pushed his way out the door and onto the crowded street. And as he pushed his way through the crowds of people, who were definitely getting out of his way less than usual and shoving against him more often than he had ever _assumed_ they would, the angel’s words stayed with him and made him think of something alarming.

_ Were they practically human now?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" plays in the background....


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley discover that some of the things they had been using ethereal and occult powers for are hard to live without.

The next day, after Crowley had slept for a more human but still not reasonable three hours, Aziraphale called him on the phone in agonies.

“Hang on, hang on,” Crowley said, holding the receiver further away from his ear. The last thing he needed was to go deaf when he couldn’t cure himself. “Say that again?”

“I can’t read!”

“What? You—Aziraphale! You’ve been miracling yourself into literacy all these millennia—?”

“Wh—ju—b—no! Crowley, don’t be ridiculous! It’s my glasses.”

“Your what?”

“My bloody reading glasses! I’ve been miracling them into the right prescription.”

“Hold on.” Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d taken his own glasses off, finally admitting defeat and deciding to just stay inside at all hours. So far, it had been easier than he’d expected. “I thought you only wore those for show?”

“I did—I mean, not for _show_—I simply thought they were what was _worn_ by those who read and—well—well, now it bloody seems I actually need glasses after all!”

“But the ones you have are not the right prescription?”

Through the following silence Crowley could tell that Aziraphale was steaming so hard that his own forehead got damp.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

‘Right over’ turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration. Determined to not have to hold onto his glasses the whole walk over, Crowley resolved on finding some way of getting them to stay up. The only solution he could think of was taping them to his ears. He stared at them for a good two minutes in the mirror in a fog of existential despair before giving up, tearing it off, and walking over with his hand to his face the whole way.

“Sorry for making you brave the wilderness of the London pavements, again,” Aziraphale said in a tone which suggested that this was not about to be very fun for Crowley.

“Mmm,” the demon said. “Given any more thought to our predicament?”

“How could I have?” Aziraphale was shuffling papers about on his desk with no apparent purpose in mind. His eyes were brighter than usual, due to being uncovered by glasses and also wide with distress. “I can’t _read_.”

Crowley looked at him there, so absurdly terrified and annoyingly single-focused, self-absorbed, helpless, and with the priorities of an eleven-year-old Hermione Granger, and so very much _him_, that he couldn’t help softening a bit. He grabbed one of the angel’s hands, which were still fluttering over his desk, and held it still.

Aziraphale stared down at his own hands with a pained expression.

“Listen. It’s all right.” Crowley let go and held his fingers up in a peace sign. “How blind are you? How many fingers am I holding up?”

Aziraphale just sighed.

“Aziraphale? Hello? Can you see me at all?”

“Really, my dear.”

“_This is your conscience speaking._”

“The world hasn’t gone dark, I just can’t read words!” Aziraphale slumped against his desk. “Why did it have to be _words?_”

“We could get you one of those magnifying glasses you wear on your head.”

The angel brightened. Crowley regretted it immediately.

“No,” he said. “You’re not wearing one of those. That was a _joke_. You’ll just have to get real glasses.”

“But I already have glasses. They only make things worse! They’re the reason I kept getting headaches. They’re supposed to _help_ people see!”

“They’re only for some people, you know.”

“I know that! I’m not an idiot, Crowley. But these were only reading glasses. They’re very mild. I thought, since I read so often, surely they could be helpful.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like the more glasses you wear, the stronger your vision gets. You don’t see people going around wearing five pairs so they can see across the whole country.”

“I _know_, Crowley, I’m not _bloody_ stupid—ah. Bother.”

“What?”

“I know why we’re so angry,” Aziraphale said, rubbing his brow. “We’re hungry. Or possibly parched, or something along those lines.”

“That can’t be it. I ate only five hours ago.”

Aziraphale looked at him suspiciously. “What did you have?”

“A muffin.”

“That’s not enough, that’s only sugar!” Aziraphale increased his brow-massaging. “You need something with actual substance to hold you over. Besides, humans, apparently, eat far more frequently than I had previously—er—thought. Yes, I’m hungry. I’m so hungry I’m finding it hard to think. Absurd.”

“I thought I remembered them eating really often in the beginning,” Crowley said, now rubbing his own temples too. “But then I started eating, and I got into the habit, so I thought I ate just as much as them. More or less.”

“Apparently not,” Aziraphale said.

There was some argument over how they were to get to the restaurant. There would have to be a restaurant, as everything in Aziraphale’s surprisingly-existent fridge had turned into pure frost a decade ago. They couldn’t go anywhere too far away. Aziraphale didn’t think he was up for a long walk, and Crowley was stoutly refusing to get in a car that someone else was driving. Finally they decided on the Ritz as though there had ever been any other alternative.

“Blast!” Aziraphale said, only halfway in his coat. He scrambled to get his other arm through the armhole, which was not where he had expected it to be—yet another thing he hadn’t realized was so difficult when you were half-starved. Still pinned in his own fabric, he turned a tragic look upon the demon. “Crowley. You didn’t make a reservation.” 

“I never make a reservation.”

“Yes, but we can’t force our way in anymore. Your demon—er—powers or whatever-you-callems, aren’t working.”

Crowley snorted. “You think I use demon powers—” he wasn’t going to waste energy on finding the right words for things, either, not if the angel wasn’t, “—to get a reservation? Have you been using miracles for that sort of thing? That’s cute.”

Aziraphale bristled. “Then what do you do?”

Crowley grinned. “I use charm.”

As it turned out, the staff at the Ritz did make a table ready for them. Whether this was because of Crowley’s charm, or the fact that the staff all knew them because they had been going there for years, one could not quite tell.

“It’s not as though Gabriel isn’t answering,” Aziraphale said, jabbing angrily at a ravioli. If humans were so hungry all the time, they could have at least had the decency to make food that was easier to eat quickly. “He’s not avoiding me—this time, anyway. The number simply doesn’t work. Not even his special one.”

“You have a _special_ number for Gabriel?”

“I had to drag it out of him,” the angel replied. He gave Crowley a look and pointed at him conspiratorially with his fork. “He’s not exactly in the book, you know.”

“Well, who is these days? All those telemarketers.”

“And whose idea was that?”

“The telemarketers?” Crowley said. “Human. The idea of putting everyone’s name and number in a nice, organized, easy-to-find book? Sounds more like _your_ sort of thinking.”

“Phone books were not one of mine,” Aziraphale sniffed. “You know how I feel about privacy.”

“Right. And your organization methods do _not_ make things ‘easy-to-find.’”

“So what I’ve been thinking is,” the angel soldiered on, “perhaps we could build some sort of—signal—something Heaven could see even through a spotty connection. Cathedrals are of course showy. They do tend to keep an eye on those. Or perhaps a holy mountain.”

“You’re going to—” Crowley had to put down his fork and rub his temple to focus. “To—what—stand up somewhere really high and wave your arms around trying to get a _signal_ to Heaven?”

Aziraphale scowled at him from over a forkful of ravioli. “If you haven’t got anything _better_.”

Crowley scooched his chair forward and leaned over the table towards the angel. “Are you sure getting their attention is what we want? I mean, what could they do to help us then? Bring us back to—well, Heaven in your case, Downstairs for mine—and then what? Is that really what we want?”

Aziraphale gave him a face that was equal parts worried, guilty, and wretched. “I don’t want to _die_, Crowley.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not going to _die_, you’re just going to—to float around on Earth for a bit without a body. _If_ you get discorporated. And correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not exactly living wild out here, you’re not quite the reckless sort who goes and risks his life every day. No hang-gliding or surfing in seas plagued with sharks, and I’m sure we’ll be fine, right?”

“You are taking care of _yourself_, aren’t you, dear boy?” Aziraphale said, his brow creased. “You’re what I think of when I hear the word ‘reckless’. You’re being careful, aren’t you?”

His concern appeased Crowley. The demon sat back and fiddled with his fork in the awkward and unfamiliar feeling of being worried over.

“I’ve been wondering about that, too,” the angel went on. “If we can’t do miracles, does that mean the layer of spirituality that covers the Earth is malfunctioning, as well? I’ve been discorporated and booted out of Heaven before, if you’ll remember, and it wasn’t exactly fun trying to find humans who are connected enough with their spiritual selves that I can speak to them. But if I can’t do anything ethereal now, does that plane even exist?”

Crowley frowned. At that moment, the bill arrived. Things were looking less ethereal and more earthly and mundane by the moment.

And then Crowley’s card was rejected.

“I’m so sorry,” their waiter kept stammering, over and over, as he explained the ‘mistake’. He was sure it must have been made on their end, but Crowley waved him off and said he was sure he had some cash somewhere. When the waiter was gone, he turned to the angel with a strained expression.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, deadpan. “Have you been powering your card through Hellish means?”

“Er—not so much my card—”

The angel raised an eyebrow.

“As my whole bank account.”

“You don’t _have money!?_”

“I don’t _have money!_” The way Crowley said it, he made it sound much more reasonable, indeed even the _idea_ that he would have money sounded absurd from his tone of voice, and he was rather proud of how well he had conveyed this through mere vocal italics. The angel did not look impressed. “What?” the demon said. “It’s not as though money is _good_.”

“The world is run by it,” Aziraphale replied. “At least, humans need it, at least the humans in this restaurant do, and by miracling it up all these years you’ve probably been—been—been blowing bubbles in the economy, or whatever, and—”

“I used to have money. Got it through all sorts of unsavory means, I might add. But I got tired of keeping it all up, so I just—look, it’s not as though one person can collapse the whole system!” The whole system which was based on greed and reducing people to productivity and all other sorts of evil, he almost added, but he decided not to chase that rabbit hole today, and bit his tongue. “If you’re so noble, why don’t you offer to pay?”

“Of course I can pay, Crowley,” Aziraphale sniffed. “I always pay my bill.”

He did. With cash. A surprising amount for anyone to be carrying. Then again, the angel always had a surplus of deep pockets, and trying to pickpocket a coat that was decades old tended to make pickpockets consider switching to a career in the clothing security industry.

They paid and then left, back onto the treacherous London streets. Crowley dared an appraising glance at Aziraphale before resuming his intensive monitoring of their dangerous surroundings. “How come you have so much cash? It’s not like you actually sell any books.”

The silence was too much. Crowley glanced to his side again. The angel looked embarrassed. Crowley grinned like a snake.

“Well—it’s not like—you see, at the time, they’re not really valuables. They’re only keepsakes.”

Crowley stared at him, waiting.

“It’s not like anyone wanted them back then!” Aziraphale cried. “Sometimes even I don’t know how valuable they’re going to turn out to be. Humans are so unpredictable. Who would have thought they’d care so much about things that happened to have been owned by a king? There have been so many kings! And they don’t care one jot for, say, the lute of a very fine musician whom no one remembers, purely out of bad fortune. So it’s not as though I’m being all that selfish in keeping a few souvenirs. No one wanted them back when I took them.”

“Aziraphale.”

The angel sighed. “All right. I sell artefacts, all right? I keep things until their age makes them valuable, and I sell them.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “I never thought you sold anything.”

“I do donate some things,” Aziraphale said desperately as they carefully navigated their way around some tourists who had stopped in the middle of the pavement, unaware of all the potential life-threatening forces that surrounded them. “I make charitable donations. To museums, and such. But there are plenty of collectors who are willing to pay—well, it keeps me going, at any rate. And I don’t have a very high rent to pay. I can be thrifty, sometimes.” He looked guilty. “It’s not too wrong, is it? Keeping things humans make—just to sell them back to them later—oh, dear.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Crowley said. “I’m just honestly surprised you ever get rid of anything. I thought you kept stuff forever.”

“Well, there’s a reason for that.”

“I thought it was just nostalgia.”

“I’d say, ninety percent nostalgia, ten percent financial security.”

“Or a hoarding problem.”

“Twenty percent a hoarding problem, seventy percent nostalgia, and ten percent financial.”

Crowley grinned at him.

“Fine,” Aziraphale said, rolling his eyes. “I’ll lend you some money, until this whole thing blows over.”

“You might say it’s a charitable donation to a friend.”

“Yes, you might,” Aziraphale said, pleased.

“You also might say it’s a charitable donation to a demon, which, I’m not sure, may not be the kind of charity your side would like you to promote.”

Aziraphale frowned, but Crowley saved him from stepping in something suspect on the ground just then, so he got away with it this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the Winnie the Pooh movies, and Gopher, from whom I got the 'in-the-book' joke.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale makes an appointment and Crowley rides in a taxi. About as human as you can get.

Crowley almost fell out of his window.

Well, he ‘almost’ fell out, in that it occurred to him as he was looking out that he _could_ have fallen, had he leaned out just a little farther, which he never would have done because he did in fact know how to not fall out of a window perfectly well, and had never really forgotten, but for a moment it hadn’t been at the top of his mind, which it _should_ have been according to his now-a-bit-paranoid mind, and so he was labeling it as a near-death experience and determined to keep the windows closed and bolted until he wasn’t potentially mortal anymore.

Bolted. People could break into his flat. Humans could _notice_ it and come in here and _break into his flat_, and there would be nothing he could do about it. He’d be no more equipped to face them than a man with a tire-iron was to face Satan.

The Bentley.

Crowley was about to run outside, determined to get his car running so he could send it somewhere safe at once.

But first, the phone rang.

Cursing, Crowley answered it. He changed his tone at once when he heard the angel’s voice. “How are you?”

“Crowley, I—I made an appointment with the optometrist.”

“Great,” Crowley said. He waited a moment. The line was silent. Then he heard a small breathy noise.

“Would you—would you go with me?”

“I’m sorry, angel, but I haven’t gotten the Bentley running. I was just about to see if I could get some petrol. I think I’ll have to walk. Why does London have to be so _big?_”

“No, I don’t mean a ride, I know you can’t help me. I just—” The tinny sound of an angel sigh across the phone lines. “I just wondered if you might go with me.”

“Why?” Crowley asked. Not annoyed, simply curious.

“Because I’m afraid to go alone.”

Crowley was impressed that he had been brave enough to admit it. He’d been feeling paranoid, too. One false step, one tumble down the stairs, and he could easily break something in himself. It would hurt. And he wouldn’t be able to stop it. And you were a lot more likely to fall down stairs if you couldn’t see properly. “All right,” he said. “Why not? It’s not like I’ve anything better to do.”

“Thanks, dear boy,” the angel said in relief.

Crowley and Aziraphale took a taxi. The man driving the car kept looking at them—or perhaps he was looking at them a normal amount. At any rate, it was more than Crowley would like. He hadn’t realized it before, but the angel and he were—_private_.

Well, that sounded odd. It wasn’t that _they_ were private. It was more that they had, for the most part, always had the resources necessary to guarantee themselves a bit of privacy wherever they went. At restaurants they always got the table that was out of the way, some nook somewhere. Most of the time when they met in public, it was somewhere _so_ public that no one would look at you for more than a second before passing on their way because there was so much _else_ to look at. Everything else was more distracting, even more so than a six-thousand year old angel who appeared, if not six-thousand, then at least a bit time-traveler-esque, with his clothes from one century and shoes from another.

In travel, of course, they took Crowley’s car, or Aziraphale went somewhere by himself. Crowley realized the angel probably did take taxis or public transport to get himself places when Crowley wasn’t willing to go and give him a ride. Which was most of the time, probably. Because Aziraphale didn’t ask. Or Crowley _would_ have given him a ride. But most of the time, Crowley realized, Aziraphale probably _did_ take a cab and then he’d be sitting in a car with some stranger, putting his life in their hands, all because he was off doing something he had _assumed_ Crowley didn’t want to do, and Crowley felt odd about that for no good reason at all.

But for the most part, it was true. They didn’t need to go anywhere far _often_. There weren’t nearly so many chores to be run that humans always seemed to be off doing that required traveling great distances. They didn’t need to speak with financial advisors or apply for jobs or _have_ jobs or do—anything. They went about by themselves. Or together. And that was it.

Sitting in a car with one man controlling where they went was unnatural and foreign, and Crowley held onto the side of his seat, trying not to let Aziraphale see, until they reached the blessed optometrist office and the both of them stumbled awkwardly out.

“Thank you again, Crowley,” Aziraphale said before they entered. He had turned to face him before they walked through the door, as though it were the portal to another dimension and they weren’t sure they would come out again as the same people. The angel laid a hand on the demon’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. His eyes looked worried. “I really do appreciate it.”

“It’s not surgery, you know,” Crowley told him. “They’re only going to ask you to look at some things and then they’ll give you something to make it better.”

Aziraphale sighed. “I know,” he said. “I only have this strange fear that if a human looks at me too closely—in my _eyes_, of all places—they’ll see something—deep within—some sort of angelic—I don’t know. Whatever it is in me that makes me _not human_.”

Crowley grabbed Aziraphale by the shoulders and looked him in the eye, his face tilted downward so that he could look with his own serpentine eyes over the tops of his glasses. He raised one brow. “Hmm,” he said. Aziraphale looked embarrassed but didn’t turn away. “Nope,” Crowley said. “All I see is a near-sighted bookworm who’s a bit too nice to be a real proper bastard.”

Aziraphale huffed out a laugh and shrugged his shoulders away from Crowley’s hands, but he smiled as he turned away from him with an “Oh, hush.”

They walked inside. There were multiple people already waiting in here, too. There were so many people, everywhere, all the time. Always having to _do_ things. How did they not get exhausted with it all?

Aziraphale sighed. “I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”

“Hmm,” Crowley said. “_Waiting_ for things. I’ve almost forgotten what that was like. What are we going to do, angel? And what do _people_ do? Half their lives are spent waiting, I bet, and I don’t understand how it doesn’t drive them crazy. Knowing there’s so much they could be doing, so much they _want_ to be doing, and so little time to do it, and it’s all slipping away like sand through a—oh, look, magazines!”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes and followed him as he made a beeline for the magazine table.

They waited, and eventually Aziraphale was called in to be examined. Crowley read about an expedition to the arctic to see the wolves. He read about how to tell when your significant other was cheating on you. He found all of the differences between the two images full of random stuff—and only two of them had been circled already. He pretended to read about local events in the area from two months earlier. He looked up every now and then, but Aziraphale was still gone. He pretended to read about the breakup of two famous people. He thought about Aziraphale, and someone staring into his eyes. Still gone.

So many other people around.

They kept glancing at him.

Looking. People kept looking at him. Why did they keep looking at him? He hated it. They weren’t staring, either. He was used to staring, but only on special occasions, like when his Bentley pulled up somewhere for the first time and people actually had taste in cars, or when he was trying to look especially chic, trendy, edgy. But today he was just sitting, and people would look at him, whenever he rustled a page of the magazine or crossed and uncrossed his legs, and they looked as though they had the nerve to wonder what he was doing there.

Sure, he was dressed a bit differently than most people at the optometrist’s office, but that didn’t mean that a double-take from that one lady had been really necessary. Was it the glasses? He made sure his eyes were covered—they were—but still, he knew it was unusual for people to wear them inside. People always did it in the movies, though. Then there were the people who looked at him and smiled, or walked past and said hello when they made eye contact. What was that supposed to mean? He was a demon. They shouldn’t be looking at him casually, giving awkward smiles of recognition the way humans did to one another.

It was annoying. It was like they were noticing him more than usual, but not because he was putting on a show of being extra frightening, or doing anything exciting, or anything. It was like they just weren’t being compelled to avoid eye contact. It was like—it was like he’d been subconsciously telling people not to look at him, surrounding himself in a bubble of inconspicuousness, using his occult power to get people to leave him alone, for centuries, and he hadn’t realized it until just now.

Now that he couldn’t do it anymore.

A middle-aged man made eye contact with his sunglasses and gave a polite nod.

“_Stop looking at me!_” Crowley burst out hysterically, unable to stop himself. The whole waiting room froze, then everyone turned away, some mumbling, because apparently they had the ability to mumble about him now, too. Crowley sat back in his chair with his arms tightly crossed, hoping Aziraphale would be done soon.

Eventually, Aziraphale returned.

“Look, Crowley,” he said obliviously to the lump of demon who was attempting to bury himself into the back of his chair. “New glasses! What do you think? Oh, but that exam. As though I could tell which looked ‘better’. They both looked slightly off, and they both looked exactly the same! But, really, do tell me what you think.”

Crowley looked up and noted that the glasses looked as much like his old ones as the angel had been able to find. They were a bit shinier. The thin gold rims gleamed. He had already stuck his old glasses chain on them.

“You look lovely,” Crowley said. The angel beamed, again oblivious, this time to the sarcasm in his voice. Crowley supposed that was probably okay. “Can we go now?”

“Of course. But we’ll have to call a taxi again. We might as well wait inside.”

“We can wait outside. One will probably pass. Let’s go.”

“Why the hurry, dear boy?” Aziraphale said as Crowley lurched to his feet and seized the angel by the arm, dragging him towards the door.

“I may have—made some enemies.”

“At the optometrist’s?” Aziraphale cried.

“Well—I say enemies—more like, embarrassed myself. A bit. Maybe.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, his eyes, to give them credit, managing not to roll behind their shining new frames. “That sort of enemy. Yes, then we’d best get you out of enemy territory, hadn’t we?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale has a plan. Crowley breaks-and-enters, without the breaking part.

Crowley’s utilities were shut off.

The idea that he really was meant to _pay_ for things that were necessary for life, like water and light and heating and electricity and television, really made him angry. He knew he could have asked the angel for more money. But he could just hear him saying, in a prim little voice while looking at him out of the corner of his eye with a very disapproving expression, ‘Let there be light’, and he simply couldn’t bear it. Besides, who needed light anyway?

He managed to eat everything he’d had in the fridge before it could go off. It had been fairly easy. He hadn’t had much, and he’d been starving, anyway.

He did manage to get the Bentley working again. He’d made the trek across London and gotten her some petrol, and since he’d kept her in good shape for all these years, that was all she’d needed. He was back on the road in no time. He considered trying to live out of his car. There was warmth and music and, well, as much food as his house now had, which was to say none. And the phone actually worked. Aziraphale wasn’t answering, but then the angel always did keep odd hours. He could ride around all day and listen to music, although driving was a bit more perilous when he realized that scaring pedestrians might actually lead to him hitting somebody. And there’d be nothing he could do. Took the fun right out of it.

Supposedly, he could hurt himself in a car wreck, too.

He drove a tad more slowly than usual as he made his way to check on the angel, who still wasn’t answering his phone.*

*That was unlike him. He usually loved to answer and inform all interested parties that the bookstore was currently closed, and, no, he wasn’t sure when it would be open next, sincerest apologies.

Well. Perhaps Crowley was driving more than a tad more slowly.

Perhaps a few people behind him honked when he failed to take a turn as quickly as they would like.

Well, what, was he supposed to believe that the other humans were obeying traffic laws just because they were laws? He wasn’t _stupid_. Whoever had invented cars must have been. Putting fragile, mad little mortals in oil-fueled metal monsters. It was completely insane.

The worst part was, he made the turn onto Aziraphale’s street so slowly that a parade of ducks could have passed him, yet he almost hit the little old lady anyway. Sure, ‘almost’ might be a bit of a stretch, as she’d still been on the pavement and he’d been firmly in the road, and ‘little’ might not be entirely accurate to describe the amount of space she had taken up when she’d brandished her handbag and waved it at his general direction in a rage, but she had _almost_ stepped off of the pavement and into the street directly in front of him, even though he’d been trying his best to be careful, and quite seriously and unexaggeratedly, the Bentley could easily have killed her.

He had to sit and breathe, in and out, for a full two minutes after he’d parked the car before getting out and walking up to the bookshop door.

Crowley pulled on the door’s handle, already hearing the expected jingle of the bell in his mind, and instead he heard the sound of a very old door jiggling in a very old and very locked doorframe. _He’s locked the door. He’s afraid_, he thought, nonsensically, still pulling on the thing with increasing panic. Then it occurred to him that Aziraphale probably always locked the door, and Crowley probably always ignored this fact and opened it anyway. He tried to magic the lock open. He remembered that he couldn’t. Now more annoyed than concerned, he started banging on the door. After a few moments, it opened.

Crowley was met by a very sleepy-looking angel who was glaring at him from under a head of hair that rarely looked quite so unruly. It was flattened on one side.

“What’s all this?” Crowley said, then, feeling a bit ridiculous*, he changed to “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

*He had seen Mary Poppins one too many times, perhaps.

“I was sleeping.”

“It’s three in the afternoon.”

“Yes.” Aziraphale’s voice was snippy. “But I didn’t want to sleep last _night_, did I?”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t bloody ever want to sleep! It’s such a waste of time, but here I am, needing to do it every single day! You know, I have to sleep for five hours _every night_.”

“That’s actually not that much. A lot of humans sleep for seven or eight hours,” said Crowley, who had the sneaking suspicion he was the type of person who needed to sleep for nine.

Aziraphale glared daggers at him.

“Look,” Crowley said. “Just—answer your phone, all right?”

“All right,” Aziraphale said. “What was the fascinating tidbit you had been planning on telling me over the phone, then, Crowley? Hmm?”

Crowley stared at him blankly. Then his face tightened, and he half-turned to leave. “All right. I’ll let you get back to your beauty sleep. And, angel? Just a suggestion?”

“Yes? What is it?”

“And I promise you, this is for your own good.”

“Spit it out, demon.”

“Tonight, sleep for at least six hours,” Crowley grumbled as he left.

Aziraphale called Crowley only the next day.

“Erm,” he said over the phone.

“Who is this?” Crowley said pleasantly.* He was perfectly aware.

*_Too_ pleasantly.

“Oh, _Crowley_,” Aziraphale said, but it didn’t sound irritated, it sounded greatly relieved, as though he hadn’t even thought he would pick the phone up at all.

“Aziraphale.”

“Crowley,” said the voice, sounding very guilty. “Look, I’ve been a bit of a bastard.”

Crowley said drily, “What a fascinating tidbit. Wherever did you learn it?”

“I’m sorry.”

Everything melted away at once, in the way things do for someone who doesn’t get apologized to very often, at least not by anyone but one person. Crowley said, more gently, “Well, look, why are you calling? And I don’t mean it in a bastard way. Just don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said in a breathy voice, then went on, “I have an idea, and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind helping me out?”

Aziraphale was grateful that Crowley had gotten the Bentley fixed. He didn’t want to say so, in case admitting that he preferred riding with him to taking the taxi was somehow seen as condoning his driving, but then again, he had been rather an ass lately. He murmured a “Glad you got her working again” to be polite as the demon opened the car door for him. Not that he understood why Crowley sometimes called it a ‘she’. None of his books had a gender, as far as he was concerned, and he certainly loved them as much as Crowley loved the Bentley.

He’d asked him, on the phone, how he had ‘kept her in good shape’. He hadn’t said it outright, but he’d always had the suspicion that Crowley knew nothing about cars. Crowley had replied that while plants needed a stern hand, cars did better with encouragement and moral support.

“Seatbelt,” Crowley said, as soon as Aziraphale’s bottom had touched the seat. It took the angel several seconds to register that he was not replying to him or trying to explain how he had fixed the car.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Put your seatbelt on!”

“_All right_,” said Aziraphale, who of course always wore his seatbelt anyway, in a tone that between them was usually left to Crowley, as he was usually the one being nagged.

Crowley walked around to his side of the car, got in, closed the door, put his hands on the wheel, then took a deep breath. Aziraphale examined his nails. Crowley stared straight ahead.

“Erm. Did I not tell you where to—”

“No,” Crowley said quickly. “It’s good. I’m going.”

And then he drove the car out onto the street, at such a normal pace that it almost gave Aziraphale an adrenaline-rush just from the comparison of how he usually drove, the way slow-motion effect is used in film to heighten the tension of certain scenes.

“So, I know churches are not your usual place of business,” the angel said as they rolled down the road. “Not going _in_ them, anyway. But I thought, _breaking_ into them, now that you might be able to help me with.”

“Mm.” Crowley sounded distracted. “And of course, you wouldn’t want to commit such a—such a crime, so you—so you brought me along?”

“This isn’t one of those holier-than-thou things. Actually, I just had no idea how to go about it.”

“And you thought I would?” Crowley turned to him incredulously, then gave a little jump. The car jerked and screeched to nearly a halt. He turned back to the road, face tense, and drove along smoothly.

“I thought, well, I _thought_ that you had watched rather more spy movies than I had.”

At this, Crowley grinned.

“You don’t have to actually come inside.”

“I don’t have to—angel, I’m not letting you break into one of the historic London churches that is always being guarded by maniacs _by yourself_.”

Aziraphale tried not to smile too brightly. It wouldn’t have mattered, because Crowley wasn’t looking at him. He was eying an actual parking space, in an actual lot, quite a ways from the church.

“It’s, er, rather far, isn’t it?”

Crowley winced. “Yeah.”

“I mean, if you want—”

“No, it’s far. It’s fine. I can do this.” Crowley made an ‘o’ with his mouth and breathed out through it, then drove down the road. Aziraphale thought his knuckles looked a bit white around the steering wheel. He felt guilty, but unsure of what to do.

There was a space on the side of the road that was actually, miraculously—or perhaps not—empty. Crowley eyed it and tightened his grip on the wheel, and though it wasn’t technically possible, Aziraphale could sense the infernal heat that _would_ have been glowing from behind his sunglasses if they hadn’t been cut off. Crowley aimed the car for the space and drove.

Ten minutes later, and Aziraphale had been out of the car directing him for five of them, the Bentley was parallel-parked and they were walking towards the church.

“Don’t say a word,” Crowley said through gritted teeth.

“Thank you, Crowley,” Aziraphale said in a small voice.

Crowley’s shoulders relaxed.

They reached the church, which was closed to tourists and guests at the moment. It had been no easy thing figuring out when such a thing was guaranteed to occur, along with the place being empty of members of the clergy, choir members, and so forth, but Aziraphale had done his research. At least with all of his angelic powers moot, he could still be good at something.

“Normally,” he said as they stood ‘casually’ outside of the church, watching passers-by and waiting for the right moment, “when I go to church, I try to do at least one good deed. Something to help someone there. To keep the places relevant, you understand.”

“Right,” Crowley said. “A miracle here and there, to keep up the old church hype.”

Aziraphale gave him a sidelong glance. “Anyway. It feels odd, not being able to do that.”

Crowley winced a little, perhaps hearing the genuine disappointment in the angel’s voice. “Sorry.”

“Oh, it’ll be all right. Er. Won’t it?”

“Sure? Oh, sure!” Crowley beamed at him. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, they’ll have everything working back again in—in no time!”

Aziraphale gave him a soft smile. “Thank you, my dear.” Then his expression hardened. “Well. If we’re going to help them _speed up_ the process, then we had better do this.”

Getting into the church turned out to be the easy part. As it went, people didn’t really expect people to break into churches all that much. Especially not ones that were open to the public on a regular basis. Especially not by picking the lock on the main door, and especially not while other people were around. People, it turned out, gave each other more credit than often seems the case. They will typically assume that people are not breaking into a church, but are instead simply entering it via unconventional means while having every right to be there, and people will also assume that their fellow humankind are not stupid enough to break into one of the oldest churches in London like the worlds’ most obvious and pathetic James Bonds.

Of all the things Crowley had been afraid of when he’d heard they couldn’t do miracles anymore, getting arrested had somehow not been one of them. He supposed they’d just have to hope that the angel’s plan worked and fixed everything before someone became suspicious and checked the security cameras that were undoubtedly watching their every move.

For some reason, Crowley had expected the church to be dark. The sun gone when there were no people there to witness it. It would have been especially fitting, considering the lack of witness from Heaven itself. But the church was as light as ever, and that only made it more strange to walk around in its empty space, feeling the cool air of stone and the out-of-place feeling of an old building with ancient art on the walls and modern pamphlets and printed bibles in the pews.

Crowley lingered in the back, the oddness of being in a church that was, to say the least, not exactly his denomination, creating an awkward sort of reaction in him, while Aziraphale moved hesitantly forward.

“Right,” the angel said, trying to sound confident. “So. All I should need to do—is—place the items in the right places, and draw a few sigils onto the ground, place the final relic in place, and, er—”

“And you’ll fix your signal, loud and clear?”

“Hopefully!”

The angel’s voice sounded both too loud and too far away in the acoustics of humanity’s great religious fervor. It seemed as good a place as any to try and shout at God. Crowley only wondered if he ought to be here when the shouting was taking place. He hadn’t considered the fact that contacting Heaven would only really fix Aziraphale’s ‘connectivity issues’. He was sure the angel would help him out if Crowley got himself into any mundane trouble once he could do miracles again, though. Only one of them really needed to be able to do it. And he didn’t exactly feel the stronger urge to reconnect with Hell.

He thought about the idea of Heaven being connected to Earth while Hell was effectively shut out of the picture. It wasn’t exactly his idea of ‘safe’. Then again, he thought about Aziraphale having ‘more power’ than him, being able to do miracles when he had nothing whatsoever, and _that_ idea didn’t make him uneasy at all. Strange.

“Blast!” came the voice of an angel from further down the hall. “Could you give me a hand, dear boy? Seems I’m not as tall as I thought I was.”

One corner of Crowley’s mouth twitched up in a grin, and he strolled towards the sound of the angel’s voice, thinking perhaps it wasn’t so strange, after all.

Aziraphale was attempting to affix some sort of candle halfway up the wall. He had dragged over a chair and was standing on it, the poor thing’s cushion squeaking in protest.*

*The chair was one of the things in the church that was decidedly modern. Aziraphale would never have stood on an ancient chair, in case the humans had given such a thing a religious meaning during one of the sermons he’d missed.

“You see,” the angel was saying, “it wouldn’t be enough to perform a ritual that _blesses_ something. This one doesn’t, which is why it’s safe for you to be in here, my dear. I couldn’t _ask_ something of Heaven, because we already know the connection is too dim. Asking something from them would only take more out of them.”

Crowley opened his mouth to say something about how he was pretty sure that wasn’t how connections worked, but then he remembered that strictly speaking, this whole thing wasn’t exactly like a bad internet connection, anyway. Who knew how Heaven really worked these days?

“So,” the angel went on, gesturing for Crowley to hand him the matches that he’d left on the ground—Crowley did—“I found something that simply addresses Upstairs. Tells them how grateful we all are for them, that sort of thing. A sort of ritual of praise.”

“Jolly,” Crowley said grimly. “Can’t way to be a part of that.”

“I won’t make you a part of it, don’t worry. At any rate, it doesn’t really do anything. Just sort of shouts, loud and clear, ‘Hello, Heaven, we’re down here and we hope you’re listening, because we actually just have nice things to say for once, nothing to ask for, don’t mind us!’ Or, well, do mind us, but only to hear us say how dashed good you are. That’s the sort of thing Upstairs is bound to pick up on.”

“Yes, I’d say if your people were going to open their ears up to anything, it’d be that.”

“You don’t have to be snarky,” Aziraphale said. “I was already doing that.”

“Right. Sorry. Carry on. So will it work?”

“I hope so.” The angel attempted to speak while holding a match between his teeth. “Thish whole thing ish getting out of hand. My glashesh keep fogging up whenever I drink tea.”

Crowley snorted. “Mine too. Who would’ve thought humans had so many petty little problems to deal with?”

“Honeshtly. If you can’t—ptew—” he spit the match back onto his palm. The chair jerked a little as the angel let go of the wall and leaned back.

“Watch out, angel.”

“If you can’t even invent glasses that can handle heat, then what are you—”

“Watch out, angel.” Crowley held the chair steady with both hands. He tried to sound playful, but it sounded a bit strained when he said, “We don’t want you falling, now do we?”

“Falling while being blasphemous in a church,” Aziraphale tutted. “No, I think that’s perhaps too spot-on, even for me.”

The angel lit the match, held it up to the candle, and the wick caught fire. Giving a satisfied nod, he turned around on top of the chair, while Crowley mentally restrained himself from grabbing the angel’s legs to keep him in place with each wobble that the blessed chair gave.

“All right, Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “I’m _coming down now_.”

“Good.”

Aziraphale grinned down at him. “You really are sweet. I’ll—” He stepped deliberately, carefully, slowly as could be off of the chair, onto the ground, one foot first, then the other—then he winced. “Ow.”

And fell into Crowley.

“Angel—!”

“S-sorry, my—ouch. Oh dear.”

“Are you—?”

“No, no, I’m all—” Aziraphale grimaced and gave a great sigh. “I’m all right. Just—embarrassed.”

“What—what happened?” Crowley gasped, still a bit stunned that Aziraphale was still leaning against him.

“I—turned my ankle.”

“_Oh_.”

“Or something.” Aziraphale sighed, and he was so close that Crowley could feel it. “Perhaps not a real sprain. Perhaps I—”

The angel trailed off as he noticed Crowley’s expression, and noticed, also, that it was rather closer than usual, and that he was still leaning against him, and that Crowley had wrapped his arms around him to keep him from falling over, and that Aziraphale’s own arms were squashed against his chest while his hands gripped his jacket, and the angel didn’t exactly blush, but his glasses did fog up.

_They really_ do _that?_

The angel backed off, and Crowley smoothed out his jacket and shirt, laughing it all off. _Trying_ to. He didn’t know if the breath that had fogged up the angel’s glasses had been the angel’s, or his own, or perhaps something else entirely. _Heat_, he thought, wildly, and he balked at his own mind, and thought, _But it’s cold in here_, then went on to think _If I could do anything right now, I’d make it warm up by ten degrees just to see the angel’s face_.

He covered up all of this by laughing very cleverly and staring at the angel without being able to tear his eyes away.

Aziraphale, fortunately, had looked away from him the moment he’d come back to himself, and was refusing to glance in his direction again. “Honestly. I stepped down as _carefully_ as could be, the pressure on my leg was _not sudden at all_, and I _still_ hurt myself. Why are we so fragile? It’s an _outrage_.”

“Call the manager,” Crowley suggested.

“Having to eat constantly, only functional a quarter to a third of the time, things getting messed up from _minor inconveniences from gravity_.”

“Ask for a refund.”

“Really, dear boy,” Aziraphale said, finally able to turn back to him to give him an admonishing look, which was exactly how Crowley had planned it.

“Don’t you have a ritual to attend to?” he said with a grin.

The angel finished setting things up. There were only a few minor occurrences of danger, mostly from paper cuts, and the demon managed to avoid rushing to his aid during each and every one of them, only just. It was simultaneously easier and harder as the angel’s expletives became more and more outlandish.

“I think that’s it.” Aziraphale stood back and dusted his hands off, then winced and said under his breath, “_Odd’s bodikins_.”

“_Whose_ bodikins?” Crowley gasped, eyebrows raised.

Aziraphale ignored him. He glanced upwards self-consciously, but there was no answer yet. “Now I just need to say the final words.”

“Make sure you mind your papercuts after you say them.”

“Hopefully,” Aziraphale said with a frown, “I won’t have papercuts for much longer after I say them.”

The angel stepped back. He waved a hand expectantly, then sighed and marched over to the last of the candles and lit it with the match himself. Then he marched back, stood before the altar, and bowed his head. He put his hands together. Crowley scratched the back of his neck and stood awkwardly aside. The angel started speaking.

Normally, this would be the point where the candle flames would start flickering.

They did not.

Aziraphale’s voice made its crescendo as he neared the end of the incantation. The glass in the windows did not start to shake. The air did not go hot or cold. Aziraphale’s voice wasn’t supernaturally loud. In fact, it sounded somewhat feeble, in spite of its volume, and a little shaky. Shivers did go down Crowley’s spine, but it was more from the sight of seeing the hope dying in Aziraphale’s eyes than anything.

The angel stopped. He took a step back. It seemed that the flames on the candles ought to have gone out, to signal their failure, but even that would have been too magical for the mundane world.

Aziraphale said, quietly, “Alone.”

Crowley sighed. He took a few steps towards him and held out his arm. “C’mon, angel. Let’s go.”

Aziraphale straightened himself up, ever the trooper, and closed his eyes. “I’ll just—get the candles, and—things.”

“At least let me give you a—something to lean on. Your ankle.”

“I was going to use this old broomstick,” Aziraphale said. He hobbled over to the wall where it had been leaning. He reached a hand toward it. “I’m sure they—don’t need it.”

Crowley thought, _I wish that stick would burn_.

“But—perhaps.” Aziraphale let his hand fall to his side. “Perhaps breaking, entering, _and_ thieving from a church is not the best idea.”

“We didn’t break anything.” Crowley walked toward him and offered his hand again. Aziraphale gratefully took it.

They gathered the rest of the candles and relics, made sure it wasn’t obvious that an angel and a demon had been there, and aimed for the door. Crowley opened it just a crack to peek out before they left, in spite of Aziraphale’s insistence that anyone looking would see that the door was opened anyway. They walked out as casually as they could, just two humans leaving church on a normal, mundane day.

Crowley thought, as they walked down the street, the angel leaning against him, _Alone_.

_Huh_.

Crowley thought about miracles.

It wasn’t really what he did was _called_. But distinct moments of demonic interference didn’t really have a name. Not one as catchy as ‘miracle’, anyway. He could call it curses or hexes or damnations, and that worked for dunking ducks or doing petty things that irritated humans, only it didn’t really feel like that when all he was doing was turning on the lights or changing the music in a restaurant to something more his style.

If he had been allowed to cast _miracles_, he liked to say to himself, he would’ve done something really good with them. Angels didn’t realize what they had. He could have stopped floods and wildfires, made people believe with a few small shows of power, made cynicism disappear.

Then again, miracles did occur all the time, even ones that weren’t really miracles at all, and there were still cynics. Hell, he was one of them, at least some of the time.*

*Not _deep down_, but some of the time, nonetheless.

And he _could_ have stopped floods. Could have made Aziraphale stop them. Could have, supposedly, done anything.

He knew it didn’t really work like that.

He thought about all of the miracles that he hadn’t done. It was all too much.

_Never know what you’ve got till it’s gone_, he thought, imagining a bottle of something alcoholic appearing in his hand, and cursing when it didn’t. But even _imagining_ things used to be different. Like making wishes. You think it, it happens. It was a bit more—_purposeful_, than that, really—but barely. Only just. He was a demon. He didn’t make a habit of making wishes.

Just as well. Some of the things he’d wish for—

Crowley frowned. _I wish I had a drink_, he thought. _I wish I didn’t have to be so bloody malicious_. No one was listening.

His brow cleared and he thought, _Imagine if my plants were the greenest in all of the world_. Nothing happened. He’d never been able to miracle his plants. Only threats and glaring. Miracling something alive into being _more_ alive had seemed, well, disturbed. _Imagine if my eyes would look bloody normal. What would that be like? I wish I weren’t so socially tragic_. That one was no good. You could never miracle things about yourself like that, anyway. _I wish people would only look at me when I want them to_. Already been doing that one, apparently. _Imagine if people thought everything I ever said was clever_. You _could_ change peoples’ minds with a miracle. Hypnotism, but because it was ethereal, not technically bad, and because _his_ was _infernal_, even worse._ What if every meal I ever ate was perfect? What if I never tasted a bad drink again? What if no one ever questioned me?_

He jumped to his feet and started pacing. _Wrong. All wrong_.

_I wish the weather was always the way I’d like it. Rainy days when I’m feeling moody, sunny when I want to go outside. I wish people would laugh at every joke I made. I wish there was always something fun to do whenever I was bored. I wish I could think of something to do right now. I wish an adventure would fall into my lap and I would take it and be brave and dashing and cool and would come home again perfectly fine, because everything had happened exactly how I’d wanted it to. I wish I had someone to tell this to and I wish they wouldn’t laugh at me when I said it. Not cruelly, anyway. I wish Aziraphale were here._

It was like popping the cap of a shaken-up bottle of soda.

_I wish it would be raining and he’d take off his wet coat and sit on the couch next to me because it’s warmer there. I wish the window would blow open and a cold gust of air would blow through and make him put that blanket over me like he did once. I wish the lights would get softer and the radio would come on and music would play. I could create any scene. I wish he’d understand. I’d—_

_ Don’t think that. Don’t even think it. Definitely don’t want it._

And then he thought, _Why?_

No one was listening. No one had ever been listening, to be honest, except for perhaps himself, but he had always been his worst betrayer, an accidental magical slip here and there that very nearly almost exposed how much that angel meant to him.

_Means to me_. He thought the words and it was as though they were echoing in the silence of nobody else being connected to him for the first time in millennia. No one is listening. What have you been wanting to say?

_I wish—_

_ I wish he’d fall again, and not be hurt in any way, because I would be there to catch him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" intensifies....
> 
> (assume he's not burning his feet, because I didn't know this would happen to him until the series came out. Aziraphale wouldn't ask him to go through that...at least not on purpose)


	5. Chapter 5

Aziraphale felt the lack of Heaven like the sudden absence of gravity. Certainly, if you were floating around in space, the situation wasn’t instantly treacherous. It was better than plummeting to your death off of the side of a cliff. It was painless and even a bit of a relief. It was also intensely unsettling. He felt as though he were rattling about like loose parts in a box of Ikea furniture that hadn’t been packaged very well. The problem with a lack of gravity was that you could _fly away_. If he died, where would he go? Where should he go, now, anyway?

He went to Crowley’s. It wasn’t perhaps the brightest idea, because being in the demon’s flat always made him feel a bit rattled, anyway, but it was the only place his mind had been able to think of. The only place he could feel less alone.

Crowley was stalking around, spritzing his plants with a harried expression. He said they hadn’t been watered in several days. They hadn’t been _listening_ to him, either, he’d said. They didn’t seem afraid. He was worried that he had only been able to put the fear of Crowley into them because of his connection with Hell. Aziraphale highly doubted this. When Crowley talked, you listened, and that had nothing to do with the fact that he was a demon. He thought it was more likely that the plants weren’t being threatened now because currently Crowley did not look very frightening.

“At least grow like normal plants,” the demon hissed, sounding guiltier than anything, through clenched teeth. “It’s only been a few days, look, I’m watering you.”

Aziraphale had paid Crowley’s bills for him directly after the church. Aziraphale had suggested drinks at his place, since the bookshop’s dust had apparently only bothered meddlesome customers before as an indirect result of some inadvertent miracling, and Crowley had discouraged the angel coming into his flat with far too much suspicious hand-waving. Aziraphale had made him let him in, and the electricity and water had been turned back on by noon the next day.

Angel or no, Aziraphale was _good_ at _phone calls_.

“They’ll be all right, won’t you?” he said, patting one of the plants affirmingly on the leaves. It didn’t reply. Of course, they never did. Aziraphale’s brow creased nonetheless. “Do you think my disrupted connection with Upstairs has also disrupted my ability to connect with all living things?”

“No,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale _hmm_-ed. He was doubtful. But then, he thought about Crowley, frowning at his plants and wondering if he’d lost his green thumb, which the angel had always thought he’d merely _mis_attributed to his infernal nature, and he relaxed.

“What are we going to do?” Aziraphale asked. “Shall we go somewhere? Or order something to be delivered—”

“Angel. How much money do you have?”

Aziraphale blushed. “Quite a lot. I’m sure we don’t need to worry about—”

“What if this goes on forever?”

He looked back at the demon’s anxious face and bit his lip. “I’m—sure it won’t come to that.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. He always tried to sound so cynical. “Faith in bureaucracy?”

“It’s not going to be forever. My people can’t stand not knowing what’s going on for that long. You know that.”

“Not forever, but I mean, forever for _us_.”

Aziraphale blinked. He’d always assumed they would be the same thing.

“What if,” Crowley said, a dangerous tenor to his voice, “we’re not immortal anymore? Angel, what if we age?”

“Oh, tosh. We won’t age.” Aziraphale frowned. “Why would we?”

“We have to eat. Sleep. We get injured. Why not? Who knows how these ‘bodies’ they gave us work? When they’re not plugged in to their power source, I mean. Maybe the only thing that makes them different from other humans is us, and we’re not us anymore—”

“We are,” Aziraphale said firmly.

“You don’t believe that.” Crowley raised his eyebrows and pointed a hysterical finger at him. “You’re concerned about this, too. ‘What if I’m not angelic enough anymore?’ Angel, if you’re allowed to have doubts, then I’m—”

“They won’t _forget_ about us,” Aziraphale cried. His heart was beating too fast. He couldn’t slow it down. His fingers were starting to feel sweaty.

“They might, they might not,” Crowley said. “Think about what Adam did. Either they’ve forgotten us, and that’s why they’ve left us alone, or they remember, and this is just their roundabout way of getting their vengeance that we’ve been protected from for so long.”

Aziraphale gave him a long, even stare. Then he said, picking his words carefully, “I think you’re building things up a bit much, and taking them personally, because you are afraid. I am, too.”

Crowley lost some of his edge, looking reassured by the angel’s honesty.

“Do you really—” Aziraphale said, “think we’re not us anymore?” _I always thought, of either of us, you knew who we were the most._

Crowley sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. “Of course we’re us,” he said after a moment.

It felt like having the truth put back into the world. Aziraphale grinned.

Crowley continued, “But still. What if we’re _slightly_ different now? What if we do start to get older?”

“Spraining my ankle by stepping off of a chair did make me feel rather like I’m getting old,” Aziraphale said with distaste. “But, well. I’ve _always_ been old, Crowley. I don’t think—” He sighed. “I don’t think the bodies they gave us are really _human_. I don’t think they’re anything. I think we’re—something different.” He frowned. “The bodies are, I mean. Truly. I don’t think we’re going to die of old age.”

Crowley nodded slowly. The leaf of a plant next to him tickled his cheek—purely by coincidence, nothing magical or animate—and he gave it a halfhearted spritz. Then he brightened. “Well,” he said. “If we were going to age, then we might as well live like we’re going to die young.”

Aziraphale refrained from rolling his eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“I mean,” Crowley said, looking as though he were the one who had been spritzed, “I’m sick of living like I’m dying.”

“But that’s exactly what you—”

“Forget _being careful_, angel.” Crowley practically danced over to the table to get his keys. “Let’s go somewhere. There’s this new niche restaurant I’ve been wanting to try out. I’ve been afraid of going since we got disconnected, because I was worried it would give me food poisoning. _Food poisoning_. If we were our full selves, we wouldn’t let a thing like that stop us!”

“Because we could miracle it away,” Aziraphale said worriedly. “Look, dear boy, I’m happy to see you feeling less down, but I don’t want to—”

“So? What’s miracling it away really do? We still feel it, for a moment at first! Otherwise we wouldn’t know to miracle anything away. So what if it’s over just a little more slowly? That’s what human lives are like. Minor things go wrong, they suffer for a bit, they get better. They survive food poisoning nine times out of ten. More often than that.” Crowley waved his keys wildly through the air. “We have to take _risks_ to find _anything_ worth _living_ for.”

“I don’t see what’s so bad about just going to the Ritz—”

“Do you want to get _tired_ of the Ritz?”

Aziraphale went pale. “Oh, _no!_”

“There you are, then.” Crowley put his hands on his hips. He was starting to look triumphant. “Don’t you see that this is what living is like? Angel? That this is our first and probably only chance to see what it’s really like to be human? This is all part of the _experience_. And it’s not so different from our own, not really, because we _do_ see the mundanity and the minor everyday suffering and the changes, the constant change that it brings when you can’t control everything. I’ve been sitting here thinking, this is awful, this is misery, we can’t _do_ anything.”

“But you’re—happy about that?”

Crowley grinned. “Who cares? Who _does_ anything, anyway? Who wants control over their lives? Frankly, I’m tired of it.”

“Erm.”

There was something about the demon’s expression that seemed off. He had started sincere, but a manic look had crept into his eye.

“I’m tired of having power over my life,” Crowley said, “that I’m not even _using_.”

Aziraphale realized then that Crowley was not really happy. The angel had thought he himself had been the most affected by all of this. Heaven was, undoubtedly, more to him than Hell was to Crowley, all of his misgivings and newfound doubts aside. But this was about more than Heaven or Hell. Something about this all seemed dreadfully existential. Aziraphale wished that, for once, he could shut him down, just as forcefully and coldly as he sometimes did without even meaning to, when Crowley went off on one of his rants. This time he wished he could, before he hurt himself too deeply. But all he could do was stare.

“Humans have always been better than us,” Crowley said. “Pardon me. Better than _my_ side. Because they aren’t just trying to be good or evil, right? They’re just themselves. So, why not live like them? Maybe that’s been our problem. My problem. I think I can just miracle everything the way I like it, but obviously, that isn’t paradise, because it’s not like I was perfectly happy _before_. Maybe now I can see what life is really like when you’re authentic.”

“_You’re_ not authentic?” Aziraphale snorted. “My dear boy, you’re more—”

“And who needs miracles?” Crowley started pacing again. He stopped by the door and gave the angel a quizzical look. “I mean, humans don’t use them. They can’t. We don’t let them. _We_ stuck them down here—”

“_You_ didn’t—”

“—and I’ve always wanted to know, how can they survive it? All this torture? How can they? I’ve always wanted to understand, and, brilliant! Here I’ve been gifted with exactly what I wanted!”

Crowley flung his hands up in the air, fingers stretched out, palms open. The knuckles of his left hand smacked right into the door.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley winced. He said, his voice cracking, “Ow.” Then his face crumpled.

“_Oh_,” Aziraphale cooed. He hurried over to him and took his hand.

They both stood there, looking down at their hands together, waiting rather pathetically.

Aziraphale realized that he had been trying to heal it. Crowley must have realized, too, because when he looked up at his face, his expression was strained.

“Oh, I—”

Crowley ripped his hand away and pulled at his hair. “_Damn_, this is the _worst!_”

“I’m sorry, Crowley,” Aziraphale said.

He shook his head. “Angel, I’m sorry. I’m—”

“It’s all right.” Aziraphale held a hand towards him, but found he didn’t know what to do with it. “It’s all—you didn’t do anything.”

Crowley bit his lip, not in a particularly pathetic-looking way, but hard, hard enough to make his mouth go white, to make him look rough around the edges, which made him look all the more pathetic after all.

Aziraphale felt the odd impulse to hug him, but they didn’t do that sort of thing, and the last thing he wanted was to give the poor demon an actual and potentially fatal heart-attack. He settled for patting him on the shoulder.

“I want to be myself again,” Crowley said, his voice rough. “At least before all this, I didn’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice,” Aziraphale said, patting his shoulder again. This time, it felt more natural. “And you always choose right.”

Crowley gave a flash of a smile that vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He looked, all of a sudden, distant. His voice shook when he said, “I wish—”

“Ah, be careful what you wish for,” Aziraphale said with a laugh, trying to cheer him up. “Or—er—that’s what they say. I suppose it was a warning against, ahm, genies, or something. Perhaps we were the errant genies they were warning against? At any rate, no granting wishes for me, I’m afraid.”

Crowley smiled at him, although he still looked rather broken. “You’re sweet,” he said.

Aziraphale was taken aback. It was too unreal a thing, too much something he would never say, not out loud, that for a moment Aziraphale felt it must have been an echo of his own words said to Crowley somehow sprung forward into time from earlier. He blinked at him.

“So you’re still an angel,” Crowley said, and everything was set in motion again, back to discussing Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, in the literal way that only they could. The demon turned from him with a smile that looked far more normal, and far less open. “And you’re right. We were worrying too much.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, without knowing why.

Crowley sighed. It sounded like a great release. “Maybe I just need to sleep more.”

“Sleeping too much can be bad for you, too.” He’d said it softly. He didn’t mean it to pick at him. Not this time. He hoped Crowley would know.

Crowley knew. He raised his eyebrows just a twitch in acknowledgment and nodded.

_How did he always know?_ “Well,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll—let you get to it. You do look tired. I mean, er—of course you would be. What with, living, and all. Sorry.”

Crowley was already walking to the hall that lead, presumably, to the bedroom that Aziraphale still couldn’t imagine him inhabiting. He gave a wave as he half-turned his back to him. “Get some rest, too, angel.”

“I will,” Aziraphale said, “I will—think of something. I promise. We’ll be all right.”

Crowley turned all the way back to him to cast a smile that was both speculative and sure. “G’night, angel.”

“Goodnight,” Aziraphale said. And, eventually, he left.


	6. Chapter 6

They were walking down the street when a car whizzed around the corner, went up onto the pavement with one wheel, and quite seriously nearly killed them both. It was no miracle that they survived, unless you counted the act of one person lunging on top of the other and sending both of them flying several feet over onto the ground a miracle.* It was action, or luck, or perhaps the way the world tended to work, teetering on the edge of disaster and never quite falling over.

*Which perhaps we ought to do.

Crowley let out a breathy blessing anyway as the numbness of shock faded and he felt the impact of cement against his back and angel on top of him. He heard the car crunch to a stop, but his vision was blurred. He gradually refocused on the shimmering aura that was in fact Aziraphale’s hair hovering above him. The angel grunted and attempted to prop himself up on one elbow.

“Din’t know you—had the—reflexes,” Crowley coughed out.

“I’ve been a bit—jumpy lately,” Aziraphale admitted. His own voice was shaky. He pulled himself up to look down at Crowley’s face. “Since—what you said—”

“Oh, no,” Crowley said. “Oh, no, I’m _sorry_, angel. Forget what I said. We’re fine. See? We’re gonna be fine. Can’t—can’t kill us that easy.”

“Mm.” Aziraphale shifted his weight so that their various bones and joints weren’t digging into each other so badly. “I suppose when it comes down to it, things like that don’t happen _too_ often.”

Crowley bit his lip. “Things I say, they rub off on you too much.”

“They always do,” Aziraphale replied, smiling, and Crowley realized he was also half-smiling, and at that moment the man from the car reached them.

“You two all right?”

Crowley, turning his head painfully against the concrete, looked over at him. The man assessed the situation. Apparently seeing nothing too deadly, he nodded.

“You two all right,” he said again, as a statement this time. Then he regarded them, lying there together, and said rather nastily, “You can get off him, now.”

And Crowley thought, solely because he knew nothing would come of it, _I wish something bad would happen to you_.

Instantly, he felt guilt swarm in his stomach.

But Aziraphale turned himself a miniscule amount so that he could squint up at the man, and said coldly, “I can get off of him, or I can stay here forever, and you can kindly go on your way, thank you for not _quite_ killing us, I don’t suppose the police _need_ to be involved.”

The man huffed and left. Crowley, still dazed, attempted to smirk up at Aziraphale. It probably looked rather pathetic. “You could stay here forever, huh?” But his voice was a little too hushed, a little too breathy, though that could have been because the angel was squeezing the breath out of his chest, quite literally for once.

“Oh, pish,” the angel said, then “I’m afraid not quite forever, as we seem to need food and drink, now.”

As Aziraphale went to stand up, picking himself off of him, getting farther away, Crowley thought, _I wish you_—but stopped. Because there are some things you don’t wish for, precisely because you know by no miracle will they ever be made true.

They were at the new ‘niche’ restaurant Crowley had wanted to visit. It did have an eclectic menu.*

*Such a thing was difficult to find, when you were coming from the perspective of someone who has lived through all of human history across the globe, but there’s human ingenuity for you.

This was perhaps why Crowley had been dawdling over the menu for nearly a half hour. Or perhaps it was the lingering thought of food poisoning.

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale said. He’d been peckish all morning, and having to leap across the pavement to knock himself and his friend to the ground to avoid sudden death hadn’t been easy on his stomach, either. “Usually I’m the one who chooses his meals as though they’ll determine the fate of the next ten years.”

“The way you stick with your favorites, what you choose practically does,” Crowley murmured, not looking up from the menu. “Especially considering how much a role food plays in your decades, as they pass by.”

Aziraphale pressed his lips together, but he knew Crowley’d said it with no rancor. “And the knack you have for finding restaurants that are destined to close down a week after we discover them means all of this is probably rather a moot point, isn’t it?”

That got the demon to look up. “Low blow.”

“Was it?”

“Well—I suppose, not comparatively.”

“Really, Crowley. Just pick something. Anything.” It felt odd, being on this side of the debate for once. He added in an attempt at sounding more like himself, “I’m sure anything will be delicious!”

“Pah,” Crowley said. “Look at this. ‘Deconstructed’. What does that—that even _mean_? _Deconstructed_? I thought we came here specifically so someone else would _construct_ the food for us?”

“People and their trends,” Aziraphale said good-naturedly.

“People and their—could just go to a grocer’s and get some bloody vegetables. Mix them all together myself.”

“I’m sure it would be delicious, if you did.”

“Least then I’d know what’s in it.”

“Crowley, this isn’t—” Aziraphale shot him a worried glance. “This isn’t about—food poisoning, is—”

“We almost _died_, Aziraphale.”

The angel frowned. “From food poisoning?”

“From the _car_.”

“Oh.”

Crowley put down the menu at last and ran his hands over his forehead, through his hair. Aziraphale had seen him do it so many times over the millennia. It always made him want to grab his hands and stop him, to stop him restlessly moving for _just_ one moment.

“They must be so scared,” Crowley said, hardly audible.

“What?”

“People. They live like this all the time.”

_I should have seen this coming_. “Oh, Crowley.”

“They’re so fragile,” Crowley said.

It felt as though the room had gone darker, even though it hadn’t. It was just something about his face. Aziraphale raised a hand to his mouth and frowned. _I really, really should have seen this coming. _He never did.

Crowley said, “Everything is dangerous for them.”

“You already knew that,” Aziraphale said, softly.

“Yeah. But it didn’t _hit_ me until just now.” Crowley leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. “Ask me. Have I ever preyed off their fear of death? Injury? Probably. It’s one of the strongest persuasive forces.” His brow crinkled just enough to let his guilt shine through. “I’ve done a lot, y’know,” he said. “Over the years.”

“You’ve been acting as though you’ve been aware of it for centuries,” Aziraphale said. “I always thought that was why you had so much understanding for them. Why, for instance, you would get so angry when someone would judge a human for doing something wrong, when they did it because they were terrified.”

“I guess it’s—a different kind of understanding.” Crowley shrugged. “Sympathy versus empathy, that kind of thing. You can know something and be aware of it and understand how it works, how it affects everything, and all that, but it’s not the same as all of a sudden—really—feeling it.”

Aziraphale tilted his head to one side.

“You’re thinking,” Crowley said, smiling at last. “I can always _see_ you thinking. But I know you know what I mean, really.”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said. “I think you really did feel it, already, and have only just forgotten. You always _acted_ like you understood it, Crowley. Understood them.”

Crowley shook his head, but still smiled. Sometimes, often, that was as much agreement as they were going to get. It was always enough.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, “why don’t you try—the nice, fully constructed, plain and simple—English breakfast.”

Crowley snorted. “Well, we _are_ in England.”

“And save the risk-taking for another day.” The angel went on, before the serpent could interrupt him, “_Not_ as a symbolic action of defeat. But as a stance of hope. _Because_ we are assuming that we will be returned to ourselves—not human, but beings who can perform miracles—and then there will be plenty of time for taking risks that can only be solved with a little bit of magic.”

“And, until then?” Crowley said, amused. “Sticking with the old, reliable comforts?”

Aziraphale smiled. “You know you like them, really.”

****************************************************************************

Above in Heaven, things were getting worked out. Issues were being _resolved_. It was important that they should be set right. It was, after all, Heaven’s claim to fame. Everyone was working hard to fix things.

This was not to care for any angels, or, certainly, any _demons_ left below. Angels didn’t need caring for. But they were going to get _terribly_ backed up on unanswered prayers. Of course, you could never answer them all. But no prayers answered was terribly bad for morale.

And, believe it or not, some angels cared.

They had seen it wasn’t the end of the world, and you had to do _something_.

****************************************************************************

Magicless, mundane, an angel and a demon—by name alone, they were beginning to think—sat in the back of a bookshop and drank water from a mug and a wine-glass, respectively.

The radio was playing something absolutely _atrocious_, some sort of smooth jazz that the classical station had the nerve to sanction, and neither of them had bothered to turn it off.

“This is weird,” Crowley said.

“It’s all I have.”

“Still can’t believe you don’t have cups.”

“You don’t drink _cocoa_ or _tea_ or _wine_ from _cups_,” Aziraphale snapped. He looked at his mug pensively. “Well. You do drink tea from cups. Special ones. Tiny. I could give you a teacup, if you prefer.”

Crowley shrugged. “This is better.” He swirled around his glass of what he was pretending was the mildest white wine in the universe.

“_Water_,” Aziraphale said. His voice was almost bitter enough to make it taste more like wine, anyway. “All the other normal glasses are still dirty from last time. I don’t _think_ to do the dishes. I _know_ they’re there, but I don’t _think_ to do them. There are other things on my mind, you know.” A wrinkle appeared above the bridge of his nose. “Do you need to wash dishes that have only had water in them? When the washing is _done_ with water, mostly?”

Crowley scrunched up his face. He stared into his glass. The clearest thing in the world. Nothing to _look_ at. “Eh. Wine glass is better, anyway. Gives you the—the fancy holdy-thingy. The stem. _Champagne flute_. That’s what we should use. Drink good ol’ London water out of shot glasses.”

Aziraphale gave him a level look from over the top of his mug. “Crowley, if you start to slur your words as though we are getting drunk from merely sitting in my bookshop with only the _suggestion_ of wine, I am going to—”

“What?” Crowley said, grinning slyly.

Aziraphale put his mug down and closed his eyes with a sigh.

“_Soap!_” Crowley exclaimed.

“What?”

“That’s why you wash them. Water and, most importantly, _soap_.”

Aziraphale glared at him. Then his expression drooped. “What I wouldn’t give for a glass of wine,” he said. “One that didn’t give me a hangover. A cup of caffeine that won’t leave me dehydrated. Not pure caffeine, of course. Oh, why didn’t I go shopping? Why must we shop to—”

He trailed off. Dust motes floated through the air. Crowley held up his all-too-clear glass and looked through it at the distorted view of the bookshop.

After a moment, the angel glanced at Crowley. There was a worried look in his eye. “Crowley?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think—I’m awful?”

Crowley blinked at him. It took him several seconds to comprehend the question.

“Oh, I mean,” Aziraphale said, waving his hand and looking disgruntled, “with the way I—the only things I miss are just, things I could buy.”

“Well, nobody likes doing the shopping.”

“I mean, it’s all just _Earthly pleasures_. All for _myself_. I never miss being able to do miracles for other people.”

“You definitely did,” Crowley said. “I specifically remember you did, at the church.”

“You know what I mean. The second Heaven’s lights went out, I was concerned only for myself. Not what it might mean for the rest of the Earth.”

_And with my hand. You did then, too_. Crowley tried to pick his wording delicately. “Earth usually takes care of itself pretty well. When Heaven is busy, I mean.”

“I _do_ know what you mean.” Aziraphale cast him a knowing glance, but he didn’t seem too peeved. He sighed. “Still. The vast majority of miracles I’ve wished I could perform would only have been for me. Just helping myself. I wish—”

There was a strained timbre to his voice that Crowley thought he could almost recognize. The demon sat up straighter in his seat.

Aziraphale deflated. “But I shouldn’t. Should I? What do you think?”

Crowley blinked. He felt as though for a moment he had slipped under sea and was now resurfacing, trying to remember what conversation they were really having.

“Is it really any good,” Aziraphale said, “if I have my ability to do _miracles_ restored to me, only to use it to miracle up things that I _want?_”

Crowley stared at Aziraphale across the table. The angel gave a rather tellingly emotionless sniff, then raised the mug to his face, only to put it down again with a look filled with distaste and shame.

The serpent considered this. Then he snorted.

The angel gave him a baffled stare.

“You’re asking me if it’s okay to ask for things?” Crowley said with an incredulous laugh. “You’re asking _me?_”

Aziraphale blinked. “Ah,” he said. “Yes.” He was almost blushing. “I see—how _you_ might not be, exactly, the person to argue—”

Crowley waved his hand through the air, effectively swiping aside all implications that this was an argument about _temptations_. This was personal. “But—you’re asking me, if _you_ taking what you want is a bad thing?”

“What difference does it make if it’s _me?_” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley wondered at the fact that he _truly didn’t know_.

“Angel.” His voice was soft now. “It’s—think about all the—all the love you’ve put into the world. Just by wanting it.” He widened his eyes. “By accepting that people want things, too. Think about why you wanted to save the world. Wanting it is probably the best thing you’ve ever done for it.”

Aziraphale finally smiled. He reached across the table and put his hand on top of Crowley’s. Crowley drank some of his water to hide his face with the wine glass, swallowing hard, the taste feeling empty. He wondered if Aziraphale would still do things like this if he knew it made him want to use every ounce of miracle he had in him to dim the lights, to change the song to something more romantic, more like _them_, to tilt the table so he had to lean forward to grab his mug before it crashed down onto the floor, lean towards him before they both came crashing down, to give the angel everything he’d ever wanted.

“Angels,” Aziraphale said, “are meant to love humans. It’s what we’re _meant_ to do.” He withdrew his hand to wrap it around his mug. “We’re meant to care for them. It’s all right for them to ask for what they want. It’s all they have.”

“And what about angels?” Crowley asked. “Who cares for them?”

“Angels don’t need anyone to care for them,” Aziraphale said, softly.

“That is _only_ the case if you care for yourself! Aziraphale, that’s what I mean. You can take care of yourself. You can—can get what you want. That’s okay.”

Aziraphale smiled a closed-mouth smile at him, eyes twinkling, said _hmm_, and Crowley knew he appreciated it, and he also doubted that he really believed him.

The angel took a sip from his mug. 

“So when we get through this, miracle all the—all the sushi rolls you like.”

“Crowley.”

“And change this blessed awful music, ‘cause frankly, that’d be doing the _whole_ world a favor.”

“Crowley. This is wine.”

“What?” Crowley said.

“My drink. It’s—it’s turned to wine.”

The demon shifted in his chair. His mouth twitched a tentative smile. “It—you miracled it back?”

“I,” Aziraphale said, “did not do this.”

“But—”

There was a wave of something through the air. Not the _air_, but something that surrounded everything in the way air did, something humans could sense but never put their finger on what it was. Angels would certainly have felt it. A demon could, too. Crowley realized what must be happening. Slowly, each step like pouring marmalade. _Miracles back. Nothing to do with you. Wine, you. That was you_.

Crowley’s mouth slowly grinned to keep from doing anything more suspicious. “I—I must’ve—well, you mentioned it, and—”

Aziraphale said nothing. He did not exclaim at the change. He was looking at Crowley.

Crowley swallowed, then chattered on, “But, look! We’re back! That’s, that’s great news. We’re back!” He snapped his fingers, and a rose appeared in them. He blinked at it. “Erm. See? All good. Er, miracles. Back online.”

Aziraphale stared at him.

“Erm.”

“This is the wine,” Aziraphale said, finally, “we had on the night after the world didn’t end. When we’d thought everything was going to be over.”

Crowley let the rose fall onto the table. “You remember?”

“And then it wasn’t. You said, ‘Everything is going to change now.’ I hardly listened to you then, because I was so glad that everything was able to stay the same.”

Crowley sat mute. The lights had gone softer. Aziraphale stared at him, wine in a mug in his hand, some things out of place, but only barely. The fax machine hidden somewhere in the shop went off, probably announcing the return of miracles to Earth. Neither of them moved.

The serpent stared at him, silent, having already said too much, without even saying a word.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said. It sounded like, ‘_Oh_.’

The radio no longer played smooth jazz. It had turned into a classical song, a waltz. It sounded like Aziraphale. It was both slow and moving constantly forward, gentle and prompting to dance, steady but with trills.

Something beautiful, with strings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I....originally meant for this to stand alone--just a fun fic where they have to get glasses and stuff!--and I'd planned to have the next fic I'm working on serve as a POSSIBLE follow-up. But, yeah, this one kind of got away from me. The next fic follows up WELL and I'm posting it soon!
> 
> Thank you for reading <3


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